This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
The price of an audiobook
I recently discovered that you can listen to audiobooks on Spotify. I mean, I knew this, since Spotify keeps recommending audiobooks to me, and has been for the last who knows. But I didn’t quite realize that the selection of audiobooks on Spotify is competitive with Audible. And I also didn’t realize that my premium Spotify membership would give me access to almost their whole library of audiobooks.
In the past few weeks, I’ve fallen in love with audiobooks. It makes sense, since my favorite kind of podcasts to listen to are the super long conversations between people whose perspectives and experience I value.
Anyway, it wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I found out there’s a limit on the number of hours that are included in my premium subscription, and that if I want more, I need to pay more money.
Bummer.
It would be tempting to launch into a pro and con comparison between Spotify and Audible, but that’s not why I’m writing about this.
I’m writing about this because I’m really glad there’s a limit on the number of hours of listening that are included in my premium membership to Spotify. Deeply glad.
I mean, sure, I’m poor, so I would selfishly love to be able to listen to as much as I want without having to pay any extra. But that would be so bad for the one remaining bastion within the publishing industry.
Spotify has already done more to decimate the livelihoods of musicians across the world than any other single entity (and it’s getting worse). I don’t want the same thing to happen to authors.
Audible works by charging a monthly subscription, and offering some finite number of book credits per month for that subscription. There are different tiers, of course, but the point is that you don’t get unlimited credits for your subscription. If you want more books, you have to pay for them.
This is healthy. This is good. This prevents the entire ecosystem from withering away.
Why does Audible do this? I haven’t done the research to know for sure, but I suspect it’s because publishers saw what happened to the music industry and said no effing way, and have been playing hardball with media platforms like Audible and Spotify ever since.
There is of course a tension between what I would love, as a consumer, and what is good for the creators that produce what I consume. Companies like Spotify are sort of like populism run amok, giving the people want they want at the expense of what’s good for them.
Because sure, paying one small subscription fee to listen to every piece of music ever made feels pretty magical, until you realize that the real cost is cultural anemia. If dramatically fewer musicians can make a living by making music, guess what we’ll have less of.
That’s right, kids! Music.
Pretty soon, we’ll all be listening to old songs, watching old movies and TV shows, reading old books.
If we want new art, we have to pay for it.
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